The first modern study of Hartley Coleridge, showing that he deserves our attention not as the son of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, but as a literary presence in his own right.

'Peerless.' Daily Telegraph 'Sprinkled with magic.' Observer 'Full of mischief, romance, fun and kindness.' The Times Soldier, journalist, historian, author of forty books, Jan Morris led an extraordinary life, witnessing such seminal moments as the first ascent of Everest, the Suez Canal Crisis, the Eichmann Trial, the Cuban Revolution and so much more. From reflections on identity and nations to the importance of good marmalade, Allegorizings is the final despatch from one of the greatest chroniclers of the twentieth century. 'A precious few [writers] report with wisdom, kindness and intelligence from the end to which we shall all come - travel of a different kind. This is such a book.' Sarah Moss, New York Times 'She was one of the most extraordinary people I ever had the luck to meet. Please read her.' Robert MacFarlane

First published in 1970, this is a detailed and balanced biography of one of the most controversial literary figures of the twentieth century. Ezra Pound, an American who left home for Venice and London at the age of twenty-three, was a leading member of the modern movement, a friend and helper of Joyce, Eliot, Yeats, Hemingway, an early supporter of Lawrence and Frost. As a critic of modern society his far-reaching and controversial theories on politics, economics and religion led him to broadcast over Rome Radio during the Second World War, after which he was indicted for treason but declared insane by an American court. He then spent more than twelve years in St Elizabeth 's Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Washington, D.C. In 1958 the changes against him were dropped and he returned to Italy where he had lived between 1924 and 1945.

To be a bookseller or librarian . . .

You have to play detective.

Be a treasure hunter. A matchmaker. A brilliant listener.

A person who creates a kind of magic by pulling a book from a shelf, handing it to someone and saying, 'You've got to read this. You're going to love it'.

In this love letter to the heroes of literacy, James Patterson uncovers true stories from booksellers and librarians. Prepare to enter a world where you can feed your curiosities, discover new voices, and find whatever you need.

Meet the smart and talented people who live between the shelves - and who can't wait to help you find your next great read.

This book is an intimate, fond and funny memoir of one of the greatest novelists of the last century. This colourful, personal, anecdotal, indiscreet and admiring memoir charts the course of Muriel Spark's life revealing her as she really was. Once, she commented sitting over a glass of chianti at the kitchen table, that she was upset that the academic whom she had appointed her official biographer did not appear to think that she had ever cracked a joke in her life. Alan Taylor here sets the record straight about this and many other things. With sources ranging from notebooks kept from his very first encounter with Muriel and the hundreds of letters they exchanged over the years, this is an invaluable portrait of one of Edinburgh's premiere novelists. The book will be published to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Muriel's birth in 2018.

In his motivational autobiography Glimpses of Greatness, Philip Guy Rochford shares the milestones of his life that mark not only his spiritual journey, but also his very successful professional career as a financier.

Rochford was born in 1933 in Port of Spain, Trinidad-arriving into the world with a clean slate of consciousness. Raised in a strict Catholic household by a single mother, Rochford received his first lessons in applied economics as he and his family dealt with the financial ripples of World War II. With an honest, conversational style, Rochford details his intriguing life story beginning with his school years when he was encouraged to work in a local pharmacy to his education in several countries to the challenges-political, professional, and personal-that he faced on a daily basis as he enjoyed a fruitful career as an economist and chartered secretary, banker, and accountant. By including questions and answer segments at the end of each chapter, Rochford allows for deeper explanations, insight, and elaboration into his life experiences and many professional accomplishments.

Rochford combines anecdotes, poetry, and letters with a compelling life story that will surely motivate others to let their brilliance shine through, no matter what their barriers.

Joy Harjo, the first Native American to serve as US poet laureate, invites us to travel along the heartaches, losses, and humble realisations of her "poet-warrior" road. A musical, kaleidoscopic and wise follow-up to Crazy Brave (ISBN 978 0 393 34543 8), Poet Warrior reveals how Harjo came to write poetry of compassion and healing, poetry with the power to unearth the truth and demand justice. Harjo listens to stories of ancestors and family, the poetry and music that she first encountered as a child and the messengers of a changing earth-owls heralding grief, resilient desert plants and a smooth green snake curled up in surprise. She celebrates the influences that shaped her poetry, among them Audre Lorde, N. Scott Momaday, Walt Whitman, Muscogee stomp dance call-and-response, Navajo horse songs, rain and sunrise. In absorbing, incantatory prose, Harjo grieves at the loss of her mother, reckons with the theft of her ancestral homeland and sheds light on the rituals that nourish her as an artist, mother, wife and community member. Moving fluidly between prose, song and poetry, Harjo recounts a luminous journey of becoming, a spiritual map that will help us all find home. Poet Warrior sings with the jazz, blues, tenderness and bravery that we know as distinctly Joy Harjo.

As a songwriter, James Weldon Johnson is best known for "Life Every Voice," which he wrote with his brother, J. Rosamond Johnson. However, during the early 1900s he was part of one of the most popular and successful songwriting teams in America. Johnson, along with his brother, Rosamond, and Bob Cole wrote hit songs for musicals during the ragtime era, 1895-1910. Later, he became one of the most prominent African-Americans in the United States before World War II. He was a diplomat, the author of a novel (The Autobiography of a Colored Man), poet ("God's Trombones"), Civil Rights leader (the first black Executive Secretary of the NAACP), an active member of the Harlem Renaissance during the 1920s and a distinguished Professor at Fisk University. Most of James Weldon Johnson's songs have not been heard for over a hundred years because he wrote during the era of sheet music. Now, for the first time, here is a collection of Johnson's lyrics and an extended biographical essay on him as a songwriter. Don Cusic is Professor of Music Business at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee and the author of 25 books. Cusic and Mike Curb produced a double album containing 30 of James Weldon Johnson's songs, recorded by Melinda Doolittle, for Curb Records.

A NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEAR From one of our greatest living writers, comes a remarkable memoir of a forgotten England. 'The war went. We sang in the playground, "Bikini lagoon, an atom bomb's boom, and two big explosions." David's father came back from Burma and didn't eat rice. Twiggy taught by reciting "The Pied Piper of Hamelin", "The Charge of the Light Brigade" and the thirteen times table. Twiggy was fat and short and he shouted, and his neck was as wide as his head. He was a bully, though he didn't take any notice of me.' In Where Shall We Run To?, Alan Garner remembers his early childhood in the Cheshire village of Alderley Edge: life at the village school as 'a sissy and a mardy-arse'; pushing his friend Harold into a clump of nettles to test the truth of dock leaves; his father joining the army to guard the family against Hitler; the coming of the Yanks, with their comics and sweets and chewing gum. From one of our greatest living writers, it is a remarkable and evocative memoir of a vanished England.

Intimate and richly detailed, The Beauty of Living begins with Cummings's Cambridge, Massachusetts upbringing and his relationship with his socially progressive but domestically domineering father. It follows Cummings through his undergraduate experience at Harvard, where he fell into a circle of aspiring writers including John Dos Passos, who became a lifelong friend. Steeped in classical paganism and literary decadence, Cummings and his friends rode the explosion of Cubism, Futurism, Imagism and other "modern" movements in the arts. As the United States prepared to enter the First World War, Cummings volunteered as an ambulance driver, was shipped out to Paris and met his first love, Marie Louise Lallemand, who was working in Paris as a prostitute. Soon after reaching the front, however, he was unjustly imprisoned in a brutal French detention centre at La Ferte-Mace. Through this confrontation with arbitrary and sadistic authority, he found the courage to listen to his own voice. Probing an underexamined yet formative time in the poet's life, this deeply researched account illuminates his ideas about love, justice, humanity and brutality. J. Alison Rosenblitt weaves together letters, journal entries and sketches with astute analyses of poems that span Cummings' career, revealing the origins of one of the twentieth century's most famous poets.

Tolstoy as Man and Artist with an Essay on Dostoevsky (1901) is a work of literary criticism by Dmitriy Merezhkovsky. Having turned from his work in poetry to a new, spiritually charged interest in fiction, Merezhkovsky sought to develop his theory of the Third Testament, an apocalyptic vision of Christianity's fulfillment in twentieth century humanity. In this collection of essays on Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Merezhkovsky explores the spiritual dimensions of the written word by examining the interconnection of being and writing for two of Russian literature's most iconic writers. For Dmitriy Merezhkovsky, an author who always wrote with philosophical and spiritual purpose, the figure of the artist as a human being is a powerful tool for understanding the quality and focus of that artist's work. Leo Tolstoy, author of such classics as War and Peace and Anna Karenina, developed a reputation as an ascetic, deeply spiritual man who envisioned his art as an extension of his political and religious beliefs. Dostoevsky, while perhaps more interested in the psychological aspects of human life, pursued a similar path in such novels as The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment. In Merezhkovsky's view, these writers came to embody in their lives and works the particularly Russian conflict between truths both human and divine. Tolstoy as Man and Artist with an Essay on Dostoevsky is an invaluable text both for its analysis of its subjects and for its illumination of the philosophical concepts explored by Merezhkovsky throughout his storied career. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Dmitriy Merezhkovsky's Tolstoy as Man and Artist with an Essay on Dostoevsky is a classic work of Russian literature reimagined for modern readers.

'Dazzlingly and daringly written' Rachel Cooke, Observer W-3 is a small psychiatric ward in a large university hospital, a world of pills and passes dispensed by an all-powerful staff, a world of veteran patients with grab-bags of tricks, a world of dishevelled, moment-to-moment existence on the edge of permanence. Bette Howland was one of those patients. In 1968, Howland was thirty-one, a single mother of two young sons, struggling to support her family on the part-time salary of a librarian; and labouring day and night at her typewriter to be a writer. One afternoon, while staying at her friend Saul Bellow's apartment, she swallowed a bottle of pills. W-3 is a vivid - and often surprisingly funny - portrait of the extraordinary community of Ward 3 and a record of a defining moment in a writer's life. The book itself would be her salvation: she wrote herself out of the grave. Originally published in 1974 and rediscovered forty years later, this is the first edition of W-3 to be published in the UK. With an original introduction by Yiyun Li, author of Where Reasons End. 'W-3 is one hell of a debut' Lucy Scholes, Paris Review 'Howland is finally getting the recognition that she deserves' Sarah Hughes, iNews

Charles Campbell was born in Sheridan, Wyoming in 1923. He studied engineering in Caltech and Purdue and earned a degree in Architecture in Columbia University in 1975. He shares his insights into some of the major developments and issues of the 20th century: the atomic bomb and peacetime control of atomic energy, national concern over the biological effects of atomic radiation, and efforts to penetrate Soviet nuclear development. He was involved in international cooperation on storage and retrieval of scientific information, and biomedical research in Rockefeller University and the New York Heart Association. His quest led to psychiatry, the Gurdjieff Work, Sufism, energetic healing, Shamanism and astrology. He gives vignettes of 35 Nobel Laureates, he earned a degree, he has known and tells about his avocations-architecture, telescope-making, printing, calligraphy and typography, and computers. He became a Dervish in Iran in 1968. After retirement, he opened a bookstore in New York specializing in Islam and the Middle East. In 2006 he graduated from the Fire and Wind Institute of Energetic Science and Heart Centered Healing and is a certified Energetic Healer and Shaman. He lives in Tappan, NY, with his wife, Vivian Davis Campbell, whose memoir, ""Love Hoped For"" was published by iUniverse.

The Journals of Sylvia Plath offers an intimate portrait of the author of the extraordinary poems for which Plath is so widely loved, but it is also characterized by a prose of vigorous immediacy which places it alongside The Bell Jar as a work of literature. These exact and complete transcriptions of the journals kept by Plath for the last twelve years of her life - covering her marriage to Ted Hughes and her struggle with depression - are a key source for the poems which make up her collections Ariel and The Colossus. 'Everything that passes before her eyes travels down from brain to pen with shattering clarity - 1950s New England, pre-co-ed Cambridge, pre-mass tourism Benidorm, where she and Hughes honeymooned, the birth of her son Nicholas in Devon in 1962. These and other passages are so graphic that you look up from the page surprised to find yourself back in the here and now . . . The struggle of self with self makes the Journals compelling and unique.' John Carey, Sunday Times

An irresistible, nostalgic, insightful-and "consistently intelligent and funny" (The New York Times Book Review)-ramble through classic children's literature from Vanity Fair contributing editor (and father of two) Bruce Handy. The dour New England Primer, thought to be the first American children's book, was first published in Boston in 1690. Offering children gems of advice such as "Strive to learn" and "Be not a dunce," it was no fun at all. So how did we get from there to "Let the wild rumpus start"? And now that we're living in a golden age of children's literature, what can adults get out of reading Where the Wild Things Are and Goodnight Moon, or Charlotte's Web and Little House on the Prairie? A "delightful excursion" (The Wall Street Journal), Wild Things revisits the classics of every American childhood, from fairy tales to The Very Hungry Caterpillar, and explores the back stories of their creators, using context and biography to understand how some of the most insightful, creative, and witty authors and illustrators of their times created their often deeply personal masterpieces. Along the way, Handy learns what The Cat in the Hat says about anarchy and absentee parenting, which themes are shared by The Runaway Bunny and Portnoy's Complaint, and why Ramona Quimby is as true an American icon as Tom Sawyer or Jay Gatsby. It's a profound, eye-opening experience to re-encounter books that you once treasured decades ago. A clear-eyed love letter to the greatest children's books and authors from Louisa May Alcott and L. Frank Baum to Eric Carle, Dr. Seuss, Mildred D. Taylor, and E.B. White, Wild Things is "a spirited, perceptive, and just outright funny account that will surely leave its readers with a new appreciation for childhood favorites" (Publishers Weekly).

The shocking, heart-breaking - and often very funny - true story behind Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. In 1985 Jeanette Winterson's first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, was published. It was Jeanette's version of the story of a terraced house in Accrington, an adopted child, and the thwarted giantess Mrs Winterson. It was a cover story, a painful past written over and repainted. It was a story of survival. This book is that story's the silent twin. It is full of hurt and humour and a fierce love of life. It is about the pursuit of happiness, about lessons in love, the search for a mother and a journey into madness and out again. It is generous, honest and true. 'Unforgettable... It's the best book I have ever read about the cost of growing up' Daisy Goodwin, Sunday Times **ONE OF THE GUARDIAN'S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21st CENTURY**